One of the more common challenges of atheists is that
people who argue for the existence of God are simply using the
"God-of-the-gaps" argument to support their belief system. There is no
question that this has happened in the past and that it is an easy trap
to fall into. In ancient times there were cultures that explained the
weather by inventing gods and goddesses that produced weather
phenomena. Many of us remember names like Thor and Minerva who were
said to cause lightning and rain. People did not understand how
lightning was produced or what it took to make rain so they invented
deities to do this explaining. Many ancient people worshipped the sun
or moon or the volcano goddess Pele because they did not understand
these objects and invented gods or goddesses to explain their origin
and how they function. This is what god-of-the-gaps
means: to explain something you do not understand by inventing a
god or goddess to do the explaining.

The god-of-the-gaps mentality is not confined to beliefs about
deity. When I was in Scotland many years ago, there was a local ghost
at a castle that many people believed in. Strange sounds that took
place at various times of the day were explained in terms of a ghost
that was warning people to stay out of the castle. As we visited, I was
able to see physical reasons for those strange sounds. The howling in
the evening was wind blowing through open spots in
the windows in the bell tower. The chains dragging across the floor was
contraction and expansion of the large rocks that made up the floor of
upper rooms. They made sounds as the temperatures changed with the
cooling and heating from the open doors and windows. Everything
ascribed to a ghost could be explained in terms of known physics. The
ghost was a god-of-thegaps ghost, produced by the ignorance of some of
the local people.

Religious people have certainly been guilty of using
god-of-the-gaps thinking in the past. Claims of miracles have sometimes
turned out to be natural phenomena and not supernatural acts of God. I
have a picture given to me by a friend that shows an appearance of the
Virgin Mary. The vision is a very bright object in the sky which does
in fact look like artistic portrayals of what Mary might have looked
like. There is a blast of light rays behind the vision coming from
above, and looking at the picture you can see why someone might believe
that it is some kind of supernatural apparition. The photograph was
taken in an area that is downwind from the famous volcano in the
Philippines named Mount Pinatubo. What is happening is that there are
several layers of clouds and heavy dust in the atmosphere. The sun is
shining through a break on the upper clouds and is shining on a
translucent layer of clouds in the lower atmosphere. The outline is
shaped like the Virgin Mary, but that shape is coincidental and in fact
did not last very long. There have been many other claims of miraculous
visions and miracles that have easy scientific explanations, and there
is no denial that believers have been guilty of god-of-the-gaps
arguments in the past.

Atheists challenge cosmological arguments for the existence of God by
claiming that all believers are doing is saying that, since we do not
understand how the creation was created, God must have done it.
Atheists believe that as science advances, it will eventually explain
the creation totally, and that this will eliminate God as an option. In
the past, some Christians have in fact used such arguments, saying that
no explanation exists; therefore, God must have done it. It may well be
that the fear some believers have of science is rooted in a
subconscious fear that science will answer cosmological questions and
prove that God is not the creator.

Cosmological arguments for the existence of God should not be made
from ignorance. We do not invent a god because of what we do not
understand. What we do is look at solid scientific choices about the
cosmos. Scientifically we can prove that there was a beginning to the
cosmos. If there was a beginning, then the beginning was caused. To say
it was not caused and that it was self-existing as the Humanist Manifesto claims puts one
at odds with all conservation laws of science, because one has to
maintain that something can come from nothing. What has to be the
nature of that cause? Since the beginning of the cosmos entails the
creation of time, space, and matter/energy, the cause must be an entity
that is outside of time, space, and matter/energy. We do not stop here
and say, "Well, that must have been God." There are other possibilities
for what might be external to these things which does not necessarily
involve God. String theory, parallel universes, virtual reality, and a
number of other alternatives have been offered. What one has to do is
look for evidence as to what properties the
cause has. More and more scientists are saying that
string theory is not a workable hypothesis because it does not have any
way of being examined or experimentally tested. It is also important to
note that there are other properties of the cosmos which offer evidence
along these lines.

As one looks at the creation, one property continues to be obvious
and that is the property of design and intelligence. The more we
understand the cosmos, the more sophisticated we understand it to be.
When I was in college many years ago the list of parameters necessary
for a lifebearing planet to exist was fairly small. The Drake Equation
which calculated the number of lifesupporting planets that could exist
included just five variables. Thanks to the Hubble telescope and
continued investigation in a wide range of sciences, we know there are
at least 47 variables (Evidence
for Design in the Universe) that would have to be carefully chosen
to produce a lifesupporting planet. We also know that proposals that
there could be life radically different than us and based on a
different chemistry are simply bad science. The laws of chemistry do
not allow such proposals to be seriously entertained.

Atheists will maintain that the design seen in all of life and in
the physical arrangements that allows life to exist are all there
because that is the only way life can in fact exist. When we see some
wonderful survival technique in a bug or an animal an atheist will say
that this technique came about by chance because if anything else had
been there it would not have worked. Reasons can be given why animals
do certain things, and evolutionary techniques explain how many animal
characteristics come about.

The first problem with such
assertions is the assumption that if I can give a theoretical
explanation as to why and how a certain behavior came about, that this
must be in fact what happened. Many times a proposed explanation turns
out to be totally bogus. One of my favorite examples of this is the
praying mantis. When praying mantis mate, the female will turn around
after the mating and bite the head off of the male and eat him. I have
seen biologists give a long elaborate discussion about what a wonderful
example this is of evolutionary process controlling populations,
solving food problems, and promoting survival of the fittest. I have
also heard atheists talk about how such a behavior is not compatible
with the God of the Bible because of its violence and cannibalistic
nature.

The problem with all of this is that this behavior does not occur in
the real world. It happens in captivity where the animals are forced
into close contact and no way of getting away from each other. The
eating of the male is almost surely a protection of the babies, and in
the wild the males simply leave and go elsewhere and there is no such
cannibalistic process. Many times observations of animal behavior is
skewed because of the effect of the observer. Human explanations are
tentative at best. The fact that we can explain something also does not
mean it is a chance process.

Evolutionary models of things also do not disprove God's role in
whatever it is we observe. Sexual reproduction is a highly designed
system that allows change in biological systems to occur. We could not
have over 100 varieties of chickens if it were not for the fact that
the reproductive systems of birds allow change. This is a design
feature that is built into the system, and if asexual reproduction was
the only method of reproduction we had, change and variety would never
take place in biological populations. The incredible wisdom of the DNA
molecule, and the way that molecule functions to allow organisms to
adapt over time to a changing world is a wonderful work of intelligence.

Francis Collins the director of the Human Genome Project in his book
The Language of God has
pointed out that the whole process of genetic reproduction radiates
intelligence and purpose and in its structure shows a plan and wisdom
of incredible degree. It is tragic that some like Richard Dawkins have
been allowed to stretch these characteristics to attempt to exclude
intelligence and relegate everything to blind mechanistic materialism.

Statistics allow us to evaluate the probability of chance being the
driving force behind all we see. Researchers from all kinds of
philosophic and religious backgrounds have applied statistics to these
discussions. The probability factors that all researchers arrive at are
astronomically small. Most numbers are in the range of ten to an
exponent that is in the hundreds. As more and more understanding has
come about concerning how many factors are necessary to produce life
and the systems that control life, that number goes higher and higher.
Writers who get numbers like one chance in 10400 or one in 10800
include believers and atheists alike. Francis Crick, Sydney Fox,
Fredrick Hoyle, Freeman Dyson, Murray Eden, and countless other
scientists all come to the same numbers. We have reviewed many of these
calculations in this journal through the years, but all calculations
show astronomically small probabilities.

The atheist response to this will be that no matter what the odds
are, if you have enough places and enough time it will happen. The
problem with this assertion is that we do not have either infinite time
or infinite space. If the cosmos began at a singularity, then there is
a limit to both time and space. The most liberal estimates of the size
of space and the length of time are on the order of ten to the
twentieth. The probabilities we have mentioned are on the order of ten
to the 400th, 800th, etc., power. They are not in the same range. The
Dirac limit, the probability number that is considered to separate that
which is possible from that which is not mathematically possible is
considered to be ten to the 60th power. Statistics say you cannot just
assume; you have to ask whether the proposal being asked is
mathematically reasonable and chance explanations simply are not. That
does not mean we automatically accept God as the answer, but it does
mean that an alternative to chance must be found. Intelligence,
purpose, and design certainly must be entertained as a possibility by
any fair-minded, thinking person. This is not a god-of-thegaps
proposal.

In recent years we have had attempts by people studying the brain
and studying psychology to explain why man conceptualizes God and
participates in worship. In the past there have been attempts to
relegate belief to ignorance and stupidity. Lenin said that religion
was the opiate of the people, implying that ignorant peasants believe
in God, but the educated elite do not. Such arrogance is not supported
by the evidence, because throughout history some of the most productive
scientists have been people who were deeply religious. Materialism
seems to be a better friend of atheism than does intelligence.

In recent years
there have been
those who have maintained that there is a section of the human brain
which causes people to be religious and to engage in religious
practices. Let us just assume for a moment that this is true, although
evidence for it is sparse. Would this disprove the existence of God?
The answer is clearly not. What it would show is that in the design of
the human brain there is a provision for the spiritual, but the very
fact that we have atheists and agnostics show that this does not
robotically program us to be religious. It is interesting that some of
those who "blame" our brain for our religious beliefs and claim to be
superior to it also maintain that homosexuality is a brain trait which
gives the homosexual no choice but to be gay.

Man is not just unique in his religious activity. Man is also unique
in his concept of self, in his structure and use of language, in his
creativity, and in his ability to do abstract thinking. There may be
contributing factors of a physical nature to these things, but the soul
and its existence is an observation shared by even people who deny the
existence of God. Man is unique, and we can have different beliefs
about how that uniqueness came to be, but it is evidence that causes us
to speak about our souls, not ignorance.

Many items about mankind will always exist in a faith framework.
Things like ones concept of self are not easily tested by science, and
we may have different beliefs about how these things came about. In
this journal we talk about evidence and give possibilities that are
compatible with faith. Belief that we are created in the image of God
with a soul are faith statements, but they are not blind faith. They
are based on evidence and are supported by things we can observe. That
belief leads to lifestyles and choices that are vital to successful
living. We urge the person who rejects the concept that man has a soul
and is created in the image of God to look at the alternatives, at not
only the evidence but at where the belief system takes one. Does it
lead to self esteem, productivity in life, security in death, and a
belief in the equality of man? One of Jesus' key teachings is "By their
fruits you will know them," and the fruit of the validity of one's
beliefs speaks loudly that man's unique spiritual make-up is not an
invented thing contrived because we have no other explanation. There is
evidence. Know why you believe what you believe.